ication of consciousness, and felt marvellously alive and
keen-minded.

"Moreover, when I took up a pencil in obedience to an impulse to
sketch--a talent not normally mine--I found that I could draw nothing
but heads, nothing, in fact, but one head--always the same--the head of
a dark-skinned woman, with huge and terrible features and a very
drooping left eye; and so well drawn, too, that I was amazed, as you may
imagine--"

"And the expression of the face--?"

Pender hesitated a moment for words, casting about with his hands in the
air and hunching his shoulders. A perceptible shudder ran over him.

"What I can only describe as--_blackness_," he replied in a low tone;
"the face of a dark and evil soul."

"You destroyed that, too?" queried the doctor sharply.

"No; I have kept the drawings," he said, with a laugh, and rose to get
them from a drawer in the writing-desk behind him.

"Here is all that remains of the pictures, you see," he added, pushing a
number of loose sheets under the doctor's eyes; "nothing but a few
scrawly lines. That's all I found the next morning. I had really drawn
no heads at all--nothing but those lines and blots and wriggles. The
pictures were entirely subjective, and existed only in my mind which
constructed them out of a few wild strokes of the pen. Like the altered
scale of space and time it was a complete delusion. These all passed, of
course, with the passing of the drug's effects. But the other thing did
not pass. I mean, the presence of that Dark Soul remained with me. It is
here still. It is real. I don't know how I can escape from it."

"It is attached to the house, not to you personally. You must leave the
house."

"Yes. Only I cannot afford to leave the house, for my work is my sole
means of support, and--well, you see, since this change I cannot even
write. They are horrible, these mirthless tales I now write, with their
mockery of laughter, their diabolical suggestion. Horrible! I shall go
mad if this continues."

He screwed his face up and looked about the room as though he expected
to see some haunting shape.

"The influence in this house, induced by my experiment, has killed in a
flash, in a sudden stroke, the sources of my humour, and, though I still
go on writing funny tales--I have a certain name, you know--my
inspiration has dried up, and much of what I write I have to burn--yes,
doctor, to burn, before any one sees it."

"As utterly alien to your own mind and